Our first day of diving

The internet is painfully slow this year. I delete emails and they re-appear since the "delete" doesn’t go through. I was able to blog last night, but only after 11 pm when most of the 13 people on the island have gone to bed. I will keep trying, but this could put a crimp in my goal of posting a daily blog entry.

Ana had a minor ear problem, so she sat out the dive today and worked with Jack to get the freezer set up for drying our settlement tiles that will be going back with us to the mainland for further analysis.

Tim and I dove on FR3 since there wasn’t a strong current, but there was a pretty good swell which makes it challenging to stay at one spot to work. This is how I remember work at FR3 in previous years — big swells and strong currents. We spent our first dive checking out our gear and then flagging almost all of the caged tiles. On our second dive we collected three tiles from the deep FR3 transect. We also grabbed one uncaged tile from the mid FR3 transect since it was loose and on its side.

loose uncaged tile 164 from FR3 middle transect

One tile broke as I was trying to put it on the metal stand for transport. My goal was only to collect 4 to 6 tiles on the first day since processing would be slow until we got our routines down. Tomorrow our plan is to collect the remaining tiles on the deep FR3 transect.

No baby corals were found on any of the tiles we brought back, but one had many large corallimorphs. Corallimorphs are marine cnidarians closely related to stony or reef building corals. The species on Palmyra is Rhodactis howesii, and it is native. The population exploded around some old ship wrecks, so they decided to remove the ship wrecks since they believed iron leaching from the wrecks was contributing to the unnaturally high numbers. Normally this is a rare species on Palmyra.

tile160 from the deep FR3 transect with 8 corallimorphs
Rhodactis howesii